Mistress of the Catacombs

by David Drake

  When the Archai fell, they continued to slash at the soldiers' legs below the studded aprons. A wounded Archa could be more dangerous than one still standing at shield height.

  Garric struck the warrior in front of him, then jumped and was saved by a reflex his ancient ancestor had honed. A toothed limb whistled beneath him, the dying stroke of an Archa with a spearpoint all the way through its thorax.

  Garric blocked a cut with his sword, brought the ball pommel of his dagger down in a hammerblow on a triangular skull, and then kicked. His hobnails and the thick leather sole of his boot took the stroke that would otherwise have severed his leg. His foot went cold to the ankle, but he could still walk on it.

  “There's no room in the world for these and men both!” Carus shouted in his mind. “They had their time. They will not have ours!”

  Garric took another step. He was out of the passage, into the huge domed vault of the sanctum. For an instant, he and the three soldiers with him faced a score of slashing warriors.

  Two men went down. A limb smashed Garric's helmet, breaking the chin strap so that the rim slipped half over his eyes. He struck left and right by instinct, feeling his blades cut deep. Blood Eagles pushed past; Attaper dragged him back against the wall beside the passageway.

  Garric gasped, bent forward to draw another breath, and would've toppled onto his face if he hadn't stuck his dagger point down onto the floor to brace him like a steel cane. His cuirass constricted him; he couldn't breathe as deeply as he needed to. A wave of dizzy nausea swept through his body ... and passed as it always did, as it had many times before when he'd worked in the pride of his strength beyond what mere bones and muscles were meant to stand.

  “Are you all right, your highness?” Attaper gasped. Like Garric, he was bracing his buttocks against the wall behind him. Soldiers crowded excitedly into the sanctum, their shields raised.

  “They're forcing the bugs back,” Carus observed critically, “but they shouldn't be taking so many casualties. Archai are sword work, not for spears.”

  Both Garric's arms and the front of his cuirass were covered with the insects' purplish ichor. It smelled like sour wine and made his skin prickle. When he moved, the dried slime pulled hairs from his arms like a coating of glue.

  “I'm all right,” Garric muttered to Attaper. He straightened to give himself a better view of the battle. “I should've told the troops to leave their spears outside and go in with swords. Holes in these bugs don't put them down quick enough.”

  As he spoke, a spear flew from the oculus in the center of the dome. He looked up. The heads of a squad of Blaise armsmen peered down from the thirty-foot opening. One knelt on the edge as Garric watched. He flung a spear and took another handed him by a comrade out of sight.

  “Sister take the fools!” Attaper fumed. “They'll be hitting our boys if they keep that up! They're a hundred and fifty feet up!”

  A yard-square piece of gilt bronze sailed through the oculus: the soldiers on the roof were tearing off the metal sheathing for missiles. From the way the sheet fluttered, it could have been cloth—but it clanged like a dropped anvil when it hit.

  “Hey!” cried a voice from above. “There's people holding out on the back wall!”

  “If it's the priests who started this,” said Attaper, “the bugs can save us the trouble of killing them. Not that I'd mind the trouble.”

  “It can't be priests,” said Carus, his expression in Garric's mind sharp with surmise. “Priests wouldn't have survived this!”

  “Hold me!” said Garric, no longer conscious of fatigue. He rammed his sword home in its sheath and used Attaper's shoulder to lift his body, his right foot braced at waist height against the wall. The molding there was very slight, but the marble lip gave his hobnails purchase.

  The vault was as wide as it was high, or at least it was too close to tell the difference without a chain. A seething mass of Archai was climbing out of the pool. On the opposite side of them was a wall of warrior bodies, spreading as more Archai climbed to the top and died there.

  Even raised a few feet from the floor, Garric couldn't see who was on the other side of the mounded corpses. But—

  An Archa reached the top; a quarterstaff slammed it at the junction of thorax and abdomen, breaking off a leg. Garric only knew one man that strong.

  He dropped to the mosaic floor, drawing his sword again. He knew what he had to do.

  “Let me handle it, lad,” said the voice in his mind. The king sounded detached and very certain. “This is a thing I've done before.”

  Then go, thought Garric, surrendering his body to his ancient ancestor. He watched like a man whose horse has taken the bit in its teeth. Save them, whatever it costs.

  The incoming troops had expanded their hold on the sanctum into an arc wide enough for a dozen men to stand abreast. They fought until they fell and were replaced by fresh troops coming through the passage. The weight of the armored soldiers pushed the Archai back, but the twin forelimbs and suicidal tenacity of the insect warriors made them terrible opponents in a close-quarter fight like this one. The mosaic pavement was slick with blood as well as ichor.

  Carus raised his ichor-smeared blade in the air like an oriflamme. “Follow me!” he shouted. He leaped through a space between two Blood Eagles—Garric hadn't believed there was a space until it was behind them—and into a wall of Archai milling like ants from a dug-up nest.

  Even watching like a spectator at a handball match, Garric couldn't fully understand what happened next. Carus moved like a dancer, using his dagger and the pommel of his sword rather than the blade.

  The Archai were quick with their chopping forelimbs; Carus was quicker yet, quicker than thought. He took strokes as he gave them, but even there the king's instinct to duck or turn put his armor under the living blades.

  The hammerblows on Garlic's helmet and breastplate dented the bronze, but chitin swords weren't dense enough to pierce metal. Some of the strokes were as hard as the one that'd stunned Garric a few minutes before, but Carus operated on a plane in which his whole being was subordinated to the task he'd set himself before beginning.

  Like a dancer, Garric thought again; but in Carus' wake lay a swath of twitching bodies as broad as a man's two arms could reach. The air about the king was a fog of ichor and blood, slung in droplets from steel blades and saw teeth.

  “Blood Eagles to me!” Attaper roared as he followed Carus into the sudden gap. “Guard your prince or be ready to fall on your swords!”

  What had been a battle turned into a sporting event of unbelievable savagery. The bodyguards slashed their way forward, no longer protecting themselves. Their only concern was to keep up with the king and their commander—

  And they did keep up, more or less, sweeping their blades into the Archai with the same careless abandon that the insects showed. The insect warriors went down with heads, limbs, even their bodies severed. Men went down also; but not as many as in the opening minutes of the battle when instead of merely killing they'd tried also to protect themselves against unfamiliar dangers ... and failed in both desires, as often as not.

  More troops tramped into the sanctum. Regular infantry and even a few Blaise armsmen mixed with the last of the bodyguard regiment. The king's advance across the floor had opened space for the human army to use its greater numbers, though Archai continued to clamber out of the central pool. The water was murky with blood.

  A section of sidewall crashed inward with a cloud of shattered concrete. Iron cast into tight-curled horns to resemble a ram's head poked into the sanctum, then withdrew to smash the hole bigger. Lord Waldron had brought one of the battering rams of the siege train up with his leading battalions.

  A good man, Waldron, for all his hot temper and stiff-necked pride in his noble lineage, A flawed man but one who had few equals ... much like Carus himself.

  The king reached the mound of Archai bodies. All Carus saw as he climbed with crunching hobnails were targets and threats, but Garri
c watching through the same eyes had a better view of the battle than he'd gotten during his brief glimpse from the wall molding.

  The troops pouring through the hole they'd battered in the sidewall were dismounted cavalrymen from the regiments of Northern Ornifal; Lord Waldron himself was at their head. There were more men than insect warriors in the sanctum, now.

  A huge chunk of the dome fell inward, raggedly doubling the size of the oculus. It carried with it two of the Blaise soldiers who'd chopped it away as a more effective missile than the spears they'd exhausted. Half fell in the bloody pool, crushing several of the Archai who were just climbing out. The creatures still appeared, but in nothing like the numbers they had when the Mistress's plans were being fed by the one-sided slaughter of the civilians she'd gathered as sacrificial animals.

  Carus beheaded an Archa atop the mound of bodies. At the same instant, Chalcus' curved blade severed both oddly jointed ankles and Cashel smashed its chest. Purple slime smeared the quarterstaff so thickly that its ferrules were indistinguishable from the hickory pole.

  “We're done, lad!” King Carus shouted in Garric's mind. “But by the Lady, so are the bugs!”

  It was Garric's body again, but it was slipping away from him. Thalemos—what was Lord Thalemos doing here?—dropped the severed Archa forelimb he'd taken for a weapon. He, Ilna, and another girl braced themselves to catch Garric's slumping figure.

  “Prince Garric and the Isles!” someone shouted over the chaos.

  “Prince Garric and the Isles!” bellowed the army. The shout grew louder with every repetition as the troops outside the building took it up also.

  It was the last sound Garric heard before he sank into the blackness of total exhaustion.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  When Garric sat very still, the sunlight felt good. The sun was well down in the western sky, though, and "very still" meant without swelling his lungs to breathe. None of his wounds was serious, but there wasn't a palm's breadth of his legs which hadn't been covered by his studded leather apron, or of his arms, which didn't have a slash or a puncture. His chest was bruised front and back, and his face was so battered that he looked out through tunnels in swollen flesh.

  “Being around your ancestor...” Sharina said, smiling at Garric as she spoke, “was a lot like leading a leopard on a chain. It's a very lovely creature with many virtues, but—”

  She snuggled against Cashel in a kittenish fashion that Garric had never expected of his sister.

  “You see your sister,” said Carus, his image grinning as it lounged against a parapet in Garric's mind. “Speaking as the man she was close as a shadow to this past week—she's a woman, lad, and I'd guess enough woman for any man she chooses.”

  “—it made me even more pleased to have someone whose strength isn't quite so... flashy.”

  Cashel put his arm around her shoulders. He didn't look at Sharina or say anything, just smiled a little broader than he'd been doing. Cashel no longer blushed at times like this, but you wouldn't say he was perfectly comfortable with it either.

  Garric had decided it was important for his troops and the populace of Tisamur to see him up and moving, but he didn't have any intention of tending to real business until he'd recuperated for another day yet. He sat on a terrace of the Citadel, looking down over Donelle to the sea beyond. Cashel, Sharina, and Tenoctris were with him; Ilna was welcome to join them if she cared to; and a line of Blood Eagles kept everybody else at a distance.

  All of the bodyguards were battered, and several looked as if they must hurt as much as Garric did. A Donelle aristocrat had been insistent about his need to see Prince Garric. Two Blood Eagles had hurled him twenty feet back, across the terrace. The fellow was lucky they hadn't tossed him over the railing instead.

  At the nearby temple site, another section of wall toppled inward with a crash and a mushroom of debris. Men were shoveling broken stone and concrete into baskets, dumping them into oxcarts on the west side or giving them to porters to carry away by the steep slope to the east.

  Only a fraction of the temple's massive sidewalls remained after a day of concentrated effort.

  Tenoctris had been watching the work over her shoulder. She turned to her companions, and said, “I'm always amazed at what people can accomplish when they join together.”

  She grinned, and added, “Not necessarily for good ends, of course. No single wizard could have opened a passage for the Mistress.”

  Local civilians were carrying out the demolition. Garric had put Count Lerdoc in charge of the work, so there were a few Blaise officers present to oversee the business. They could've stayed in their billets without decreasing the enthusiasm with which the crews worked.

  Lord Lerdain was one of the officers—by choice, Garric had no doubt. The youth strutted like a fighting cock, wearing the helmet that'd been hammered when he followed Garric—followed Carus—through the mass of Archai. The boy was lucky he'd been knocked silly at the start of the rush; otherwise, he'd probably have been killed. But he'd paid his dues, and now he displayed the damaged helmet with rightful pride.

  Cashel watched with the professional interest of a man who'd done his share of heavy labor. “They're trying to prove to you that they're loyal,” he said, looking amused. “They don't know the tricks of moving big rocks, but they're as willing as any folk I've seen. They'll be lucky if they don't kill themselves, though.”

  “Convincing me they're loyal is pretty much a lost cause," Garric said. His smile was more cynical than it would have been in the days before he became a prince. “What I do believe, though, is that Moon Wisdom's as dead as the Children of the Mistress who were leading it.”

  He nodded toward the workmen. “They're at least making an effort to seem loyal.”

  “The Children weren't leading Moon Wisdom,” Tenoctris said, her eyes focused on a place beyond her present surroundings. “They were just its human face.”

  Garric remembered the blackness of a cave and the hairy limbs, stiff with age but still living, which held him for the Mistress's fangs. “Sure, that's true,” he said.

  But if any Children had survived the carnage in the temple, he'd have hanged them as soon as the fighting was over. People who gave themselves over to something so unutterably evil had no business walking the Earth in the company of decent folk.

  “Those people have their own reasons for tearing the temple down” Carus noted with a grim smile. “Having their own allies hack hundreds of them apart for a blood sacrifice makes the rule of a king from Valles seem not such a bad thing.”

  Another section of wall came down in a crackling roar that almost drowned the screams of the woman who'd been caught in it. Cashel winced.

  “I wouldn't bet it was a woman, lad,” Carus said, neither smiling nor frowning. “When they're hurt bad, anybody's likely to sound that way. Even the brave ones, unless they go numb instead.”

  A trumpet sounded in one of the squares below. Men shouted in cadence, then stepped off with a clash of hobnails on cobblestones.

  Lord Waldron was re-forming his battalions, mixing four companies of the old royal army with two composed of the mercenaries who'd garrisoned Donelle during the rebellion. Most of the organization took place outside the city walls where there was more room, but... loyal or not, it was good for the people of Tisamur to see the highly trained royal army up close.

  Garric looked at his sister, smiling faintly at how painful the simple movement was. Every muscle of his neck had been strained by the effort of holding his head straight while blows raining on one side or another of his helmet tried to twist it.

  “Sharina, does Lord Tadai have things under control?” he asked. “I should've gone to see him myself, but...”

  It felt remarkably good to sit with his friends. The days he'd been alone seemed like a lifetime ... as indeed it had been, for Gar.

  “When he arrived with the supply fleet, he went straight to the municipal palace,” Sharina said, smiling at the memory. “He di
dn't even bother getting a night's sleep before he and his aides started going over the accounts from both the city and the temple.”

  “They had accounts?” said Cashel with a frown. “I thought they were wizards.”

  “Wizards need to eat too,” Tenoctris said. “Though for some of us, that's not much of a priority.”

  “They were running a rebellion,” Garric said. “That means messengers, clerks, supply departments—and the mercenaries themselves, to be paid and billeted.”

  “None of which happens at the wave of an athame,” Sharina agreed. “At any rate, I think Lord Tadai takes more pleasure in that sort of thing than he does in wine and dancing girls.”

  Carus laughed with an amusement that spread to Garric's own lips. As the others looked at him, Garric explained, “I don't imagine going over financial records will ever replace reading Celondre as the way I like to relax. But my ancestor”—he lifted the cord holding the coronation medallion of King Carus to emphasize it—“was never really as much himself during peace as he was in the middle of a battlefield.”

  “And I saw more battlefields than I did days of peace, lad,” the king's spirit agreed. Suddenly sober, he went on, “I was so afraid that I'd fail you this time, the way I'd failed the kingdom before in my anger and my arrogance. Thanks to your sister and the Lady, I did not do that quite.”

  “They're blocking the conduit that fed the temple pool?" Tenoctris asked suddenly. She'd been watching the workmen again. “Not that it was the water itself that...”

  “Yes,” said Garric forcefully. “Blocking the tube and diverting the aqueduct that fed it. I told Waldron to get a squadron of cavalry out to trace the route. We'll block the inlet too when we've found it.”

  “It was salt water,” said Sharina. She nodded eastward over the city. “The sea's well below our level here.”

  “Yes,” said Tenoctris. “It is. And Garric, I'm not sure your men are going to find the inlet.”

  She smiled. “Though I don't think that really matters, because of what your army did here and what you did where you were.”